It's official: drink rots the brain but puzzles improve it. So mine's a pint and a cryptic crossword

His is going to be easy, I thought, when I read the first question in the 15-minute home test for early signs of mental decay, reported in Monday’s papers: ‘What is today’s date? (from memory — no cheating!) Month___ Date___ Year___.’ January 12, 2014, of course! Except that it wasn’t. A glance at the top of the page told me it was the 13th.

Oh, hell. Did this really mean I was on the road to dementia? Surely it was the sort of mistake that even the sharpest-witted among us could make, at any age, within just a few minutes of stumbling out of bed? Hoping to set my mind at rest, I turned to the internet and printed off the full test, devised by researchers at Ohio State University and posted under the magnificently scientific-sounding title: ‘Self-Administered Gerocognitive Examination’, or SAGE for short.

On the whole, after my shaky start with the date, I found it reassuring. I had no trouble in writing down the names of 12 different fruits or vegetables (other versions of the test ask us to name a dozen different countries, animals, or non-food items usually found in the kitchen).

The test: US researchers say this home-test will be able to chart how older people are progressing

Similarly, I was up to the challenge
of drawing a large clock-face, with the hands positioned at ten past 11 —
a task that presumably would have defeated Joey Essex from TOWIE, who
confessed on I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! that he couldn’t
tell the time on his fabulously expensive watch.

I
even managed to conquer my lifelong difficulties with maths to work
out, after a shaming 60 seconds of Biro-sucking, the change from a $5
bill for groceries worth $1.95.

But I confess that a couple of questions had me scratching my head.

Though I could instantly recognise a drawing of two dominoes as, well, a drawing of two dominoes, what was that thing beside them? Was it a piece of rope tied in a knot (if so, why was it covered in spots?) — or a not-very-skilfully-drawn pretzel? Or was it something else? And what’s the correct answer to the question: ‘How are a corkscrew and a hammer similar?’

Um, they’re both hand-tools of a sort, I suppose — although that’s not the expression that springs to my mind when I think of a corkscrew. And they both offer means of access to the contents of a glass bottle — one more radical than the other.

But that cannot, surely, be what they’re after, can it? Since the scientists who devised SAGE appear not to have suggested any answers to the questions they set, I can only guess. All they offer instead are scoring instructions for doctors, to whom we’re meant to submit our completed tests for marking (which suggests to me that the researchers of Ohio may have some cognitive difficulty with the meaning of the term ‘Self-Administered’).

Where the drawing of that spotty-knotted-rope/pretzel thingy is concerned, they appear to assume that all doctors will immediately know what it’s meant to be, merely instructing them to award one mark for the correct answer and none for the wrong one.

Doctors warn the test will not diagnose dementia, merely mild loss of mental function. It is still not known whether screening would be beneficial for Alzheimer's patients

As for the similarities between hammers and corkscrews, the guidance states only that two marks should be given for an abstract answer, one for a concrete and none for any other.

So to score the full two marks, perhaps I should have answered that both objects offer means of exerting force by converting chemical into kinetic energy (I know a thousand science teachers will kindly put me right if I’ve got that wrong.)

'I have a dreadful memory. I’m forever forgetting names, faces, facts, birthdays, anniversaries and tax returns. I can read a novel or watch a film, oblivious until the last page or final scene that I read it or saw it only a few months ago'

Something tells me, however, that SAGE’s inventors were not really looking for such smarty-pants answers. They’re even prepared to be magnanimous over my mistake with the date, offering me one mark each for getting the month and year right. And though I would have scored another two marks for knowing it was the 13th, they still award me one for being right within three days.

So I get three marks out of a possible four for the date, even though I got it wrong.

If only my teachers had been as lenient, I might have done better in my school history exams (sorry, ‘Self-Administered Historicocognitive Examinations’).

Overall, what struck me most forcibly about SAGE was how simple most of the questions appeared to be. Indeed, even allowing for doubts about one or two of my answers, I flatter myself that my final score, out of a maximum of 22, was comfortably more than 17 — above which, say the researchers, ‘individuals are very likely to be normal’.

All I can say, as I may have observed before, is that I have a dreadful memory. I’m forever forgetting names, faces, facts, birthdays, anniversaries and tax returns (damn — that reminds me — only 14 days to go before the deadline). I can read a novel or watch a film, oblivious until the last page or final scene that I read it or saw it only a few months ago.

So if I’m ‘very likely to be normal’, where does this leave the 28 per cent of over-50s who score fewer than 17 SAGE points, indicating that they have ‘mild memory or thinking impairments’ — or, if they score fewer than 14, a more severe condition?

True, most of those who take the test do so because, like me, they think they have reason to worry about memory loss. So it would be misleading to suggest that more than a quarter of the over-50 population is abnormally afflicted.

But if 280 in the first 1,000 tested really did have trouble in, say, listing 12 countries or identifying drawings of volcanoes or rhinoceroses, this really does bring home the scale and horror of the dementia crisis.

Crossword: Thankfully, completing a cryptic puzzle is still trumped as one way of keeping the brain active

People such as me, who are merely absent-minded, should perhaps count ourselves lucky and stop complaining.

Which brings me to yesterday’s all-too-plausible study, this one from University College London, which suggests that such memory loss as I do suffer is my own damned fault.

The researchers found that men in their 40s who drink two pints of beer a day — and at 60, I must own up to having drunk considerably more than that daily for four decades — risk accelerating mental decline by up to six years by the time they reach retirement age.

Two pints of doubt please: Daily beer can make men's memories wooly quicker, another study has found

For some reason, female drinkers don’t seem to suffer nearly as much, while women who never touch a drop decline notably faster than those who do, which doesn’t seem fair.

Where men are concerned, I can’t pretend to be in the least surprised by the findings. After all, there have been more than a few occasions over the years when I’ve woken up after a night on the tiles, completely unable to remember how I got home or who I was drinking with.

Mind you, I have never suffered as badly as a friend who was finally driven to Alcoholics Anonymous, where they ask new recruits to share with the group the moment when they reached rock bottom.

According to his account, the lady who spoke before him said she realised she had a problem when she left her gloves on the train.

When his turn came, he said that he had woken up one morning in Baltimore, Maryland, with no memory of how he got there — no memory of anything, indeed, since he had left his office in London three days earlier for a swift one at the pub on the way home.

If alcohol can obliterate short-term memory like that, it’s hardly a wonder that it has damaging long-term effects, too.

But it’s not all bad news this week.

For yet another study — from Johns Hopkins University (in Baltimore, funnily enough) — finds that solving crosswords and other puzzles can help 80-year-olds to retain the brainpower of people ten years their junior.

Now, as I remember very well that I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a cryptic crossword addict since I was 13, and no day of mine is complete before I’ve finished at least one.

So do the beneficial effects of all those crosswords cancel out the malign influence of the drink? And does this explain why my SAGE results suggest I’m ‘very likely to be normal’? I’ll drink to that. It’s just question of how to open that bottle. Anyone got a hammer?